During the 21+ years I’ve known Matt, I’ve heard him give many talks and be questioned by hundreds of people. I’ve read what seems like millions of words he’s written, and I’ve edited some of the essays in this book many times over. I think it’s reasonable to say I’m more familiar with Matt’s way of thinking than anyone else.

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Matt is that he doesn’t deal in superficialities. He’s always trying to find the crux of the issue and address the root. At his core, Matt is an engineer, and he seeks to understand the fundamentals in order to optimize the solution (for example, see graphs below). Given his nature, Matt’s writings and speeches focus on only a handful of topics. From these few basics, he derives specific conclusions, depending on the specific question. For his first book, The Animal Activist’s Handbook, Matt took his and Bruce Friedrich’s essays and talks, broke them down, and rearranged them into a coherent, linear progression, with a very specific narrative arc. For The Accidental Activist, however, I said he should do something different: let those individual pieces stand alone, organized only by general topic. Thus, it’s my “fault” this book isn’t linear. If you try to read straight through, the repetition will almost certainly bore or frustrate you. (Sorry Matt, but on your chosen topics, you can be like a dog with a vegan bone.) Furthermore, given that the essays aren’t organized by date but rather jump around in time, it can be confusing to read something positive from 2010, then a crisis from the late 1990s, only to next come across a glowing, optimistic vision of the future from 2013. My strong advice, therefore, is don’t read The Accidental Activist from beginning to end! Rather, choose based on which topic you’re interested in at the moment, or by which chapter title sounds intriguing. Although these essays were never meant to be part of a single, coherent book, we regularly hear from people whose lives have been changed by these essays. I am confident some will resonate with you, too.-Anne Green